Just two days after Yahoo! admitted hackers had raided its database of at least 500 million accounts, the Purple Palace is being dragged into court.
Two Yahoo! users in San Diego, California, filed on Friday a class-action claim [PDF] against the troubled web biz: Yahoo! is accused of failing to take due care of sensitive …

Updated
Hackers strongly believed to be state-sponsored swiped account records for 500 million or more Yahoo! webmail users. And who knew there were that many people using its email?
The troubled online giant said on Thursday that the break-in occurred in late 2014, and that names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, …

Refund checks promised by Intel after recalling its ill-fated wrist-burning Basis smartwatches are bouncing for some unlucky punters.
Amid a global safety recall, Basis Peak owners in the UK were offered a £184 refund to turn in their troublesome armslabs. Unfortunately, Chipzilla's payouts, delivered via Western Union, are …

Updated
Gugi, a bank-account-raiding trojan for smartphones, has been retooled to bypass Android 6's security features designed to block phishing attempts and ransomware infections.
The modified malware forces users into giving it the ability to overlay genuine apps, send and view SMSes, make calls, and more. The software nasty is …

Pics
Corrective brand surgery seems to be taking place at EMC’s London HQ already – it may be that Michael Dell is so keen to get his hands on the storage giant that he can’t wait for the ink to dry on the deal.
Following a tip-off about the changes taking place, El Reg in the UK braved the mean streets of Richmond and Kew to reach …

Dell has chosen one-time AMD exec and its current veep of sales John Byrne to head up its near-$36bn turnover global channel biz, once it has swallowed EMC in the coming weeks.
The $67bn buy of the storage giant is due to close late in July or early August, sources close to the situation told us, when the enlarged organ will …

It's what we all assumed, but quietly hoped wasn't quite this bad.
Lazy makers of home routers and the Internet of Things are reusing the same small set of hardcoded security keys, leaving them open to hijacking en masse, researchers have warned.
In other words, if you can log into one gizmo remotely, you can probably log …

The majority of US presidential candidates' websites failed a basic privacy and security audit.
In the Presidential Candidate Online Trust Audit, an audit by the Online Trust Alliance (OTA), the failures in 17 out of 23 cases came as a result of a variety of poor privacy practices, including the sharing or trading of website …

The Philae lander may well be alive and mostly well upon Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, but the European Space Agency (ESA) is trying to patch its radio transmitters to overcome communications problems.
That's the gist, as your correspondent sees it, of a lengthy “behind the scenes” post from ESA boffins explaining their …

Vulture nybbles
Google has emitted its first monthly batch of security updates for the latest version of Android – as promised in early August.
The web giant vowed to regularly release fixes for vulnerabilities after it was rocked by the Stagefright bug that affected potentially hundreds of millions of devices.
The first patch batch is …

Law professor and internet luminary Lawrence Lessig will run for the US Presidency after hitting his US$1million crowdfunding goal.
Lessig announced his conditional candidacy, and a platform to take money out of US politics, in early August. A week later, Wikipedian Jimbo Wales clambered aboard the bandwagon.
Both admitted …

Security researcher Brian Krebs last week named whoever is behind the Twitter account deuszu as likely having had a hand in the Ashley Madison hack. But has Krebs named the right entity?
Attribution isn't that easy and Krebs has gone out on a limb.
Take, for example, Krebs' belief that a fondness for the AC/DC tune …

Google is set to reopen its Maps service to user-submitted edits and labels albeit through a new moderating process.
The web goliath will use a team of hand-selected users to screen edits to its maps and approve any changes. Previously, Google employees were taxed with monitoring all submitted revisions of Maps.
"Map Maker …

Microsoft has run into a few hurdles in its manufacturing process for its Surface Hub wall-mounted touchscreen and as a result, it now says it won't be able to ship them when it initially thought it could.
Redmond started taking preorders for the digital whiteboards on July 1, and in June it said it expected to start shipping …

QuoTW
This was the week of Linux desktops, 3D-printed combustive robot bums and massive data leaks. Again.
Time for some of our favourite quips, scoffs and gibes of the past week:
US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) boss Katherine Archuleta has decided that losing the private info of 25 million people is quite enough for one …

Microsoft has announced that Windows 10 will launch in "summer" this year.
The news emerged from an event in China, so it seems safe to assume Redmond means the northern hemisphere's summer between June and August.
Executive veep for Windows Terry Myerson says Windows 10 "will launch in 190 countries and 111 languages".
We' …

Exciting news from outer space today, as it has emerged that a "mysterious" pyramid-like "structure" has been discovered on the surface of a comet plunging towards the inner solar system from beyond the orbit of Mars.
Necropolis-esque comet structure
The comet in question is 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, and the discovery has …

VMworld 2014
VMware, Google and Nvidia have teamed up with a plan to bring the most demanding desktop apps to relatively piddly Chromebooks.
VMware already has relationships with the other two companies mentioned above. The pact with Google sees it offer the BLAST client to pipe apps from Horizon View into Chromebooks. The Nvidia …

VMworld 2014
VMware applied for two more hardware-related trademarks this month, it has emerged.
One application is for “EVO”, described as “Computer hardware and software for virtualization; computer hardware and software enabling users to manage virtual computing resources that include networking.”
A second application, “EVO: RAIL”, is …

Analysis
On 30 November 2014, the European Commission will have been probing Google's search business practices for a whopping four years.
Formal proceedings were opened against the ad giant in late 2010.
The date is significant, given that by then we should also know who will replace antitrust boss Joaquin Almunia in Brussels.
As …

Regulators in Europe are about to rewrite a settlement with Google and expand their anti-competition probe into the web giant, it's claimed. The company was already under the microscope for allegedly screwing over its rivals in web search results.
The Wall Street Journal cited the proverbial "person with knowledge" in …

Bookselling giant Barnes & Noble is back in the tablet business – sort of – thanks to a new partnership with Samsung.
The company announced on Thursday that it will soon offer co-branded Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 Nook fondleslabs that come preloaded with custom software for reading e-books, magazines, and newspapers provided by …

A wave of cheap Windows 8.1 (with added Bing) devices will wash over the UK this summer but the distribution channel's finest aren't exactly rubbing their hands together in anticipation - quite the opposite really.
Until Microsoft last week confirmed the plan to release a new licensing option, the UK PR team - which gets nods …

A pair of cyber-extortionists who attempted to blackmail a Manchester-based online casino with threats of unleashing a debilitating denial of service attack have been jailed for five years and four months.
Piotr Smirnow, 31, of Tawerny, Warsaw, Poland, and Patryk Surmacki, 35, of Szezecin, Poland, pleaded guilty at Manchester …

Analysis
Two years ago today, Apple cofounder Steve Jobs died. Since then, much has changed at Apple, with the most visible difference being Tim Cook stepping out from under the shadow of his larger-than-life predecessor, shepherding Apple's product lines, expanding its distribution, reshuffling its executive team, mollifying investors …

The notorious online drug market Silk Road has been shut down by the FBI, its suspected operator arrested and charged with narcotics trafficking conspiracy, computer hacking conspiracy, and money laundering conspiracy, and $3.6m worth of the bitcoin crypto-currency has been confiscated by federal agents.
The site's alleged …

The privacy-enhancing Tor network has seen its total number of users per day more than double in the last month, reaching the highest levels since the project first began compiling usage statistics.
Graph of Tor users for August 2013
Tor traffic was up all over the globe in August 2013 – and we do mean up (Source: Tor …

Struggling Canadian smartphone maker BlackBerry shouldn't expect any help from the government, a prominent cabinet minister has indicated.
Although he acknowledged that BlackBerry is having "a hard time" with its latest products, Canadian Minister of Industry James Moore told Bloomberg, "It's for them to engage the market and …

Two weeks after it was first made aware of the problem, Xerox has begun rolling out a fix for a software glitch that caused numbers in documents scanned by certain of its WorkCentre multi-function printers (MFPs) to come up garbled.
"Our engineering team has been working around the clock to deliver the patch," Xerox wrote in a …

Steve Scott, the system interconnect expert who was the lead designer for the three most current generations of node-lashing routers and server interconnect interfaces for Cray supercomputers, has a new gig at hyperscale data center operator Google. For the past two years, Scott has been the chief technology officer for Nvidia's …

Updated
Nearly 1,350 HP Enterprise Services workers downed tools as part of multi-day industrial action in protest against the mass redundancy programme, at least according to the PCS trade union.
Industrial officer Alan Brown said up to 90 per cent of the union's 1,500 HPES members went on strike on Wednesday and Thursday this week, …

Mozilla developers are considering dropping support for the <blink> tag from future versions of the Firefox browser, in a move that would see the web rid of the scourge of blinking text once and for all.
Firefox's Gecko HTML rendering engine is currently the only one to support the blinking effect, which usability expert Jakob …

Software giant and systems player Oracle has restarted software development for Itanium-based machines. That sound you hear is a sigh of relief from HP-UX system customers the world over and from Hewlett-Packard, whose Integrity and Superdome servers fell off a cliff, in terms of sales, after Oracle pulled the plug on Itanium …

Video
Last Friday the Sun put on a magnificent display, ejecting a massive solar filament that was captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) in all its glory.
According to NASA's announcement, the filament – a form of solar prominence – had been hovering in the Sun's atmosphere, or corona, since early August, and erupted …

Chinese mobile manufacturers Huawei and ZTE each announced the UK rollout of their respective mid-range handsets last week, the Ascend P1 and the Grand X.
Huawei's Ascend P1 packs a 4.3in touchscreen display with a resolution of 960 x 540. It comes running into the market with a 1.5GHz TI OMAP 4460 dual-core processor powering …

Failed camera biz Eastman Kodak says it has been given permission by the bankruptcy court to sell patents that Apple claims it owns.
Kodak won approval on Monday to go ahead with a planned auction of 1,100 patents, known as the Digital Capture and Imaging Systems and Services portfolios, the firm said.
"We are gratified that …

Archaeologic
The Acorn Archimedes is 25 years old this month. The first machines based on the company's ARM (Acorn Risc Machine) processor were announced in June 1987, the year after the 32-bit chip itself was launched.
Four versions of the Archimedes were released in 1987: the A305, A310, A410 and A440. The first two had 512KB and 1MB of …

HDD prices are falling eight times more slowly than they rose in the weeks after the flooding in Thailand and look likely to remain inflated until mid-summer.
Idealo.co.uk monitored vendors' online average selling prices (ASPs) across its five price comparison portals and found that disk drives went up 100 per cent in 33 days …

Updated
John Swainson, president of Dell Software, took control of the giant's nascent software business last week and has moved fast, using the Dell checkbook to snap up SonicWall – a firewall and threat-management software and appliance maker – for an undisclosed sum.
SonicWall, which was founded in 1991 by brothers Sreekanth and …

The US Air Force Space Command's 14-month effort to save a $2bn military communications satellite overcame failed thrusters, threatened explosion, space debris, and destructive radiation, thanks in great measure to tiny thrusters with a mere 0.05 pounds of oomph.
It wasn't easy, as airforce-magazine.com reports in a blow-by- …

A Saudi prince whose investment company claims to have a fondness for free speech has plopped $300m into the coffers of Twitter, the 140-characters-at-a-time social networking service widely touted as an enabler of this year's Arab Spring.
"Our investment in Twitter reaffirms our ability in identifying suitable opportunities …

Cisco chief John Chambers' total direct remuneration package slumped 65 per cent in fiscal 2011 to a mere $6.625m (£4.14m), according to an SEC filing.
Clearly the time has come for the Chambers' household to switch to the value range in supermarkets, holiday at home and downgrade the family fleet of cars.
The long-serving …

A senior Red Hat engineer has lashed back at Microsoft's attempt to downplay concerns that upcoming secure boot features will make it impossible to install Linux on Windows 8 certified systems.
Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) specifications are designed to offer faster boot times and improved security over current …

IDF 2011
Do you know why Intel hasn't launched the Sandy Bridge-EP Xeon E5 processor for two-socket servers? Neither do we, but after attending Intel Developer Forum last week, we have some pretty good guesses.
Given the relative dearth of processor news at the IDF show, the attendees and vendors that El Reg spoke to at the show had …

Google has added to its ammo dump in the patent hostilities, buying over a thousand more of IBM's patents.
The search engine behemoth bought 1,023 patents from IBM in August, according to records filed at the US Patent and Trademark Office's website, and originally reported on the SEO by the Sea blog.
IBM declined to comment …

Policy wonks from Twitter, Facebook and BlackBerry faced MPs on the Home Affairs committee today who were carrying out a postmortem of the disorder across England last month.
Each company reiterated earlier statements that they operated within UK law when providing their communication services to their customers.
BlackBerry's …

Review
AV receivers have made a concerted effort to keep up with TVs, consoles, set-top boxes and disc players in recent years by incorporating an Ethernet port to play your digital music collection over a network as well as internet radio and extras like Last FM and Napster.
Onkyo TX-NR609
Double bass player: Onkyo's TX-NR609 …

Lobby groups representing a majority of US advertisers and online media companies have demanded that domain name overseer ICANN slam the brakes on its controversial new generic top-level domains programme.
Claiming the gTLD programme is "likely to cause irreparable harm and damage", the US Association of National Advertisers ( …

Sony Ericsson has posted Android 2.3 Gingerbread for last year's Xperia X10 smartphone.
The phone maker promised the much sought after upgrade back in March, saying the software would arrive "late Q2/early Q3". Later, it revised that timeframe to early August.
But we're still in late July, and here's Gingerbread.
Sony …

The Wellcome Trust charitable foundation has stepped outside the world of healthcare research funding and taken a stake in a new trans-Atlantic cable system.
The Emerald Atlantis submarine cable system has been given the green light after securing vendor TE SubCom to deploy the 5,200 km sub-sea network. The first phase of the …